Wednesday, May 24, 2006

Gibberish

$GiantFirm is angry.

You say you are responding to all tickets within 24 hours. Why did you take five days to answer ours?!?!

Well, Dieter, perhaps it's because no one understood your fucking ticket. If you'd submitted it in English, some monkey somewhere in the world could've picked it up. Instead it sat waiting for some schmuck (yours truly, natch) to translate it.

And after I'd translated it none of the other monkeys picked it up because they figured even if they responded in English you'd come back to them in your own language and turn what started out as a PITA ticket into a full-blown nightmare with melting landscapes, tall buildings and hungry clowns. We've had it happen many times before.

Every couple of weeks we get a ticket submitted in French, German, Portuguese. We've also had them in Dutch, Swedish, and other less-popular languages. About five years ago we got one in Czech. That was fun.

We make it clear to every customer that support is done in English. This often means mangled English, and I don't mean screwing up they're/there/their or lose/loose like so many supposed native speakers do. We get quite a lot of Googlefish translations (popular in France and Germany) which we'll often have to reverse-translate to understand and then get a colleague to properly translate for us.

We also occasionally get the word-for-word dictionary translations so that the entire content is incorrect English words in using some other language's grammar. This can be amusing for some but for most it's just frustrating and annoying.

This means that we have to write the answers in such a way that when the customer heads back to Googlefish to translate our answers, they remain clear, something rather hard to judge if you don't know the language yourself.

Once in a while we get a ticket from a guy who's either on so many drug he makes Keith Richards look like a sober schoolgirl or he's been up for four days straight and the full hallucinations have kicked in, something like this:

In giving to you the question of the manage to be system, where comes flowering and that it is seen as otherwise. Given to send, she waits rather and our doing is none.

Pure poetry.

I more than understand language barriers and am often on the other side, but the requirement for communications through our support system is the use of English or something at least closely resembling it. If you can't be bothered to get one of your English-speaking colleagues (for example, that colleague of yours we actually trained... in English), you can wait a week for someone who speaks that language to get around to it.

In compliance with $MegaCorp's general policies as well as my desire to
continue living under a roof and not the sky or a bus shelter, I add this:

DISCLAIMER:The views expressed on this blog are my own and
do not necessarily reflect the views of $MegaCorp, even if every
single one of my cow-orkers who has discovered this blog agrees with me
and would also like to see the implementation of Root Cause: 17-Fuckwit.